Wisdom of Crowds: Cross‐Sectional Variation in the Informativeness of Third‐Party‐Generated Product Information on Twitter
研究了Twitter上第三方生成的产品信息汇总到企业层面后能否预测企业销售，并分析了预测能力在横截面上的变化因素，发现评论的代表性、广告强度及评论来源（大众或专家）影响预测效果。
ABSTRACT This paper examines whether third‐party‐generated product information on Twitter, once aggregated at the firm level, is predictive of firm‐level sales, and if so, what factors determine the cross‐sectional variation in the predictive power. First, the predictive power of Twitter comments increases with the extent to which they fairly represent the broad customer response to products and brands. The predictive power is greater for firms whose major customers are consumers rather than businesses. Second, the word‐of‐mouth effect of Twitter comments is greater when advertising is limited. Third, a detailed analysis of the identity of the tweet handles provides the additional insights that the predictive power of the volume of Twitter comments is dominated by “the wisdom of crowds,” whereas the predictive power of the valence of Twitter comments is largely attributable to expert comments. Furthermore, Twitter comments not only reflect upcoming sales, but also capture an unexpected component of sales growth.